Soccer – The Game Where I Can Be Me

The smell of freshly cut green grass that gives me motivation like any other. Everything stops once I walk on the field. I can’t remember a single worry that could have been ailing me. School, work, friends, and stress all seem to vanish from my mind after my cleats first initial graze of the lush green beneath them. The normality of it all should feel meaningless but instead it empowers me. As I gaze at the field. All I can remember is the victories as if it was replaying right in front of my very eyes for the millionth time. This is where I come to find my inner peace. This is where I can be me, playing soccer.

My goal is the most important thing when walking onto the field. The goal that either makes or breaks the game, it’s in our hands or theirs. The goal is worn from age and the countless shots that have been taken on it over the years. The paint on the field fades away, the green begins to turn brown. Although I have played every position there is, right in front of the goal is where I belong. Protecting that eight by twenty-four rectangle is what my team counts on me to do. The eighteen foot rectangle just in front of the goal defines boundaries with a crisp white painted line. I can hear every voice that cheers me on from the stands, especially my mom's voice; which I can always pick out of a crowd. The voices cheer me on, attempt to coach me, and even sometimes get frustrated with me. The scoreboard, the one and only judge of the game, stands tall at the end of the field shadowing over me and my team mates.

When running this noose shaped death trap, you must circle it a minimum of four times before you can say you have accomplished anything of some worth and significance; this being one full mile. The loathsome benches sit on the side of the field, and mock me for every mistake I make; for I know that any error I make has the power to put me into its cold unforgiving clutches, where I may have to spend the remainder of the game. The cold, cruel metal is the one place on the field I truly detest. And although I respect and admire the soccer field in nearly all its entirety, there is nothing I despise more than the prison that the bench represents. The prisoners get placed in its confinements after making a blunder of some sort and are then forced to remain behind its bars dependent on how fatal their mistake was. The prisoners are then involuntarily compelled to watch those, who were previously their equals, out on the vast green ocean of freedom playing. While they can do nothing but watch and attempt to be supportive, they are anxiously waiting to get out and join the others on the limitless and far-reaching green ocean the grass field symbolizes.

The field is the one place I feel most at home, and content with myself. Its massiveness energizes and ignites my spirit, and provokes a lightheartedness within me that only it can bring out. To a mere passerby, it may not look like more than a patch of grass and a couple of beaten up and withering goal posts, but to me it is so much more. In conclusion to this essay I can say that soccer is a sanctuary for me, a therapist for my troubles, a shoulder to cry on for my bad days, and a best friend when I have no one to turn to.